We all want more merchant adoption, we want to pay with sats for our groceries or enjoying a beer in a bar.
But also many merchants, small shops, bars don't know how to start quickly accepting Bitcoin, but still having some certain control of their money. Yes, there are so many custodial, semi-custodial, self-custodial solutions, payment processors, BTCpay, LNbits, Alby etc but sometimes for certain use cases, are not the most suitable ones.
So today I am presenting you a quick simple solution and I had in mind you @BTCLNAT or any other user LATAM or from places where internet is quite restricted or not always online, slow or forced to use Tor.
How to use Rizful node + Zeus PoS in your shop
What you need:
- some sats into another LN wallet, required to buy some liquidity through an inbound channel. If you still do not have any sats (you start from zero) it also can be your first customer paying with sats (or the bitcoiner friend helping you with the setup).
- Rizful.com - simple but powerful self-manageable LN node in the cloud and free.
- Zeus PoS - fast and simple PoS that can be connected to various funding sources (including receive-only) with NWC connection.
- Setup your Rizful node
- go to Rizful.com and create a free account. Save all the information you get from starting your LN node: nodeID, LN address (can be personalized), login details, both NWC strings (receive only + send/receive string).
- buy your first inbound channel. Their documentation is very helpful and straight forward.
- click on the "get inbound" button and select the channel size you need. Size it correctly! Calculate more or less how much you will be receiving during a certain period of time, depending of your activity. Let's say for 1 week you expect to receive aprox 500k sats. So you will buy a 500k sats channel for around 13k sats fee. The channel will be almost instant open and ready to be used.
Optional you can also open a channel with other LN nodes, but with funds from onchain wallet, but you will need to deposit first into your Rizful node onchain and from there opening the channel. Be aware, that will be "Outbound capacity" so you will not be able to receive until you start making some payment and drain a bit that channel. A LN channel is like a glass filled with water. You can have a full glass but also you an empty glass, depending on what do you need more. But as a merchant you should start with an empty glass because you start to receive more.
- generate your NWC strings. One for receive only (for the Zeus PoS, used by your employees) and another one for yourself (send/receive - full access) to be used in your own wallet app (Zeus, Alby Go etc).
- Setup your Zeus PoS
- Install Zeus, using Obtainium or ZapStore. Please skip the shitty Google or Apple stores.
- In the first screen, select "Advanced" and create a new connection using the NWC (Nostr Wallet Connect) option from the drop-down menu. Put a name to your wallet and optional an image.
- paste the "receive-only" NWC string from Rizful node into the NWC URL field and save the wallet config.
- Go back to main screen and from top left menu select "Settings" - "Security" - "Set PIN". You must put a PIN to access Zeus in order to link any account to the PoS.
- Go back to main screen in "Settings" and choose "Point of Sale". From the drop-down menu (default option "disabled") select "standalone".
- Start configuring your products, prices etc and done, your PoS is ready to be used.
- You can access the PoS from top right menu icon that will appear once you activate the standalone PoS.
Now you are ready to sale your products directly from that PoS and receive the sats straight into your Rizful node.
What to do once you start charging with bitcoin
If you have successful sales with bitcoin, your LN channel will get filled quite fast.
So what you have to do? Empty the channel into your own onchain wallet.
Let's say you have a 500k sats channel and from your Zeus PoS report you received 400k in 3 days. Or you,, as the owner, can login to your Rizful node and check the channel balance.
We suppose you already have prepared an onchain wallet to save your stack. You can use Sparrow or Electrum or whatever onchain wallet you want.
Go to a swap service and prepare a swap into your onchain wallet address from your Rizful node. You will pay a LN invoice from Rizful node page directly or from your "full access NWC" using Zeus or Alby Go, if you like (NOT from your shop Zeus PoS, that is receive-only!).
DO NOT swap out all the balance ! Leave like 1%. So in our example will be like 390k sats sending to the swap service through a LN invoice and provide the BTC address from your onchain wallet (Sparrow, Electrum etc) to receive the sats. This way you can re-use that inbound channel multiple times.
Swap services you can use (select Lightning BTC to BTC):
- Swap Market (it can have multiple swap providers): https://swapmarket.github.io/
- Boltz: https://boltz.exchange/
- FixedFloat: https://ff.io/
- Robosats - P2P exchange: https://robosats.org/ (put order to "sell" sats from LN into an onchain address.
- CoinOS (custodial): https://coinos.io (require to create a free account, no-KYC and then send sats over LN and withdraw to your onchain. It can be used also as a temporary custodial "cache" to empty your channel until you move out the funds into bigger UTXOs.
- Blink (custodial): https://blink.sv (require to create an account and then internally swap to your self-custodial onchain address). It can be used also as a temporary custodial "cache" to empty your channel until you move out the funds into bigger UTXOs.
- Wallet of Satoshi (custodial): https://walletofsatoshi.com - with integrated swap to onchain. It can be used also as a temporary custodial "cache" to empty your channel until you move out the funds into bigger UTXOs.
- more about submarine swaps and fees here in a SN post: #163372
DONE. Happy Lightning!
Conclusion
And that's it! The idea is that after each certain period of receiving sats from your sales, you empty the channel into an onchain address, in self-custody.
Later once you accumulate more sats and you are more comfortable with LN nodes, you read and learn more about how to manage them (see my extensive guides about nodes) you can go more advanced running your own BTCPay server or a LNbits, with more tools for e-shops.
Or you can just continue with Zeus PoS, but this time, using it with its own embedded node (see my extensive guide for Zeus) and have full control over your own LND node, managing channels, liquidity etc.
You can also switch anytime between a NWC wallet to embedded LN node inside Zeus, for your PoS. It works the same, with multiple funding sources. For example, your embedded LN node in Zeus got filled quickly and you do not have time for a making a swap out. So you can switch instantly to a Rizful NWC wallet and continue charging sats in your empty channel.
I hope this mini guide will help you for more Bitcoin adoption!